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Why Are There No Popular Ultima Online-Like MMOs?
eldavojohn writes "I have a slightly older friend who played through the glory days of Ultima Online. Yes, their servers are still up and running, but he often waxes nostalgic about certain gameplay functions of UO that he misses. I must say that these aspects make me smile and wonder what it would be like to play in such a world — things like housing, thieving and looting that you don't see in the most popular massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft. So, I've followed him through a few games, including Darkfall and now Mortal Online. And these (seemingly European developed) games are constantly fading into obscurity and never catching hold. We constantly move from one to the next. Does anyone know of a popular three-dimensional game that has UO-like rules and gameplay? Perhaps one that UO players gravitated to after leaving UO? If you think that the very things that have been removed (housing and thieving would be two good topics) caused WoW to become the most popular MMO, why is that? Do UO rules not translate well to a true 3D environment? Are people incapable of planning for corpse looting? Are players really that inept that developers don't want to leave us in control of risk analysis? I'm familiar with the Bartle Test but if anyone could point me to more resources as to why Killer-oriented games have faded out of popularity, I'd be interested."
PvP realms are hardly empty- lots of people played on them, especially at launch. The problem is that arena and battlegrounds have killed world pvp, so there's little to no real pvp anymore. You can go 0 to 80 with only a handful of pvp deaths these days. In the old days you'd get a handful an hour, many of which were real fights you had a chance of winning. Since 99.9% of pvp happens in instances these days there's no reason to roll pvp anymore, that's why the pvp realms now have smaller pops.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Because any private server would suck some subscriptions from them. Companies open source things because they have something to gain from it, or because its EOL and they want goodwill (or want someone else to maintain it). Where's the upside for Blizzard in doing it?
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
You can still play classic UO on independent servers. The biggest one is http://www.uogamers.com/
You want this. http://uosecondage.com/ "Second Age is a free Ultima Online Shard that can be accessed by anyone with UO client software. Second Age is the most accurate emulation of the UO: T2A era online today. There are no giveaways. On UO Second Age you will build your character(s) from the ground up." Been running for about 2 years now, good user base and well moderated.
Yes, you do have a timed learning system, but you crucially forget that the time scales logarithmically but the bonuses are linear. You can spend a quarter the time skilling and achieve over 90% of the same performance as someone who's skilled for years. That last 10% can easily be made up by skill, some planning, or a friend.
The second thing is the obsession with T2 ships being OMGPWNZRS. You can credibly fight with a basic T1 frigate or cruiser for much lower cost and time investment. Hell, you can even make it a profitable proposition with some planning. Lost your ship? No matter, the insurance payout is more than the cost to buy and fit it! Can't do that with T2 in the least. T2 ships are specialized beasts. They do one thing and do it well, but at a penalty at doing anything else, and at a much, MUCH higher cost. You know what the most popular frigate is to go out and kick ass? It's the Rifter, a basic T1 frigate that you can be flying in less than three hours. With bad attributes.
Thirdly, guess what, there is only a fininte amount of skills that can help with anything. Myself, I have almost 70m skillpoints. Ooh I should be a combat monster. But I'm not. Most of it is industrial skills for manufacturing. Want to fly and make others die? You can have a character that can whomp me in less than six months by yourself. Fly with a friend and you can be in that same postion in perhaps a month.
But hey, what do I know about this anyways? I'm just a manufacturer....
"Best" by the metric of "can work as a team during a RAID lasting several hours."
Not "best" by the metric of, "having the most fun" or "meeting new friends" or "trading/crafting like a well-run shop" or any of the thousand other ways I'd consider somebody good at the game. I know from experience that most of the people in those raiding guilds are miserable.
(And why wouldn't they be? The guilds are full of assholes who enforce schedules like the worst bureaucrats... the "crime" of living on the west coast and having a 9-5 job is enough to be rejected by those asses.)
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The WoW-like item grind is what really threw off the balance of that world.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I think you have a one sided view to what exactly some people really loved. You have taken the one view that you have and exptrapolated it out to everyone.
What I personally liked about UO and personally believe killed it had to do with the introduction of portals and instant anywhere travel. When OU was big, open, and took a good bit of time to get from one corner of the world to the other it had a vastly different feel. In the beta and the first year it was the wild fucking west. I could stay out in the woods in the far north east corner of the map and not see someone for days.
It also at later levels became very interesting to battle. You talk of griefers and I would suggest that you did not fully understand how to deal with them. I would say stealing was a problem only if you did not have the understanding that the best gear was easy to get and made it very easy to have a level playing field.
I would also point out that a grandmaster with a dex of 100 and a str of 100 could kill a fully armored plate master with a barduchie(spelling?) with little to no problem ass naked with a dagger. The skill was more important than the gear! I could hit you 100 times before you could get a swing off because of the fighting mech would make you start your swing over every time you got hit.
Just because you did did not understand the mech of the game well enough to hand yourself does not make the game bad. I found that not having forced policies onto your game style to control the wild west part of the world does not mean that it was not fun as shit to have your ass handed to you every now and then.
People liked the idea of loosing things if you got to far away from the city without protection.
People in that game where stupid, if you carried more than you needed and die you lost it. Who carries eveyrthing they own. It was stupid people being stupid.
People liked the danger of running from town to town alone and the smartest mob out there was someone else.
People liked to hunt others down for being ass hats.
People liked playing in a group of five guys that knew how to handle the game, did not get griefed by anyone because they got there asses handed to them.
People disliked the game because it did not coddle the idea of the less common denominator. It was, dare I say it, a little more difficult.
You see, the people that did not like OU just did not like the game play. They wanted to be protected from the harshness. They wanted to be able to die without loosing anything. They wanted to play solo and not actually act like they where all alone.
I call bullshit on anyone that says UO was not fun and point to thier own lack of knowledge toward how they should have been playing instead of how they figured it should have been played.
I loved the game when it was in the first 2 years. I was not a griefer, I was the anti griefer. I was the guy that stood at the Fork glowing Red and never starting a fight. Just waiting and giving you the chance for glory.
Why did I enjoy UO in its late-beta early-release stage, then, as a complete non-griefer?
Granted, I was a lot younger back then, so this may all simply be rose-tinted goggles.
But here's what I liked about it:
Player housing that wasn't too widespread. This was before every buildable square inch of the gameworld was covered in castles and houses. The wilderness actually felt like wilderness. There were birds flitting around, and then all of a sudden you hear an ettin roar. Rut roh! (Compare to when I left it, about a year later: running between houses.. between houses.. argh what's with all the houses.. hey, a tower with "ASS" spelt out in cloth on its roof..)
First entrepreneurial act: saving up enough money to buy one of those rare dye tubs in the trinsic tailer's shop, and proceeding to sell customization to other players who missed the spawn! Then again, the guards were broken that day in beta, and a group of hoodlums had set up shop at the south entrance. (beta)
Hanging out at the Yew Trading Company; one of the first guilds on Great Lakes to get a house with a forge in it placed it in the field at the crossroads just south of Yew. They took & delivered orders through the window. Occasionally PKs would attack, so they formed an alliance with a more combat oriented guild. They'd pay guildmembers to sit around outside and protect their clientele.
A true sense of "danger;" every time a stranger came on screen I'd hit my all names hotkey. If they were red, I'd run the other direction as fast as I could. Running away from those big bad dread lords was fun! It got my blood pumping! Heck, I'd just bought some new platemail from Lilo! Compared to yawn, another instance...
Had one character who was perpetually grey. Had studded leather armor of the best magical rating, along with an imminently accurate bow of vanquishing. And he was a GM archer/tactician/hiding. PKs and NPKs alike would try to kill him. He'd either run and hide or kill 'em outright. What kept him grey was if he saw someone kill an animal (bird|rabbit|hart|bear) and not skin it, he'd run em out of "his woods." After giving them ample warning to gtfo our quit it.
The Orcs who set up base at the orc camp southwest of Yew. They were badass, and humongous. Occasionally they'd set up camp along the road and demand tribute. Occasionally they'd get attacked by people who thought they were badass PvP guilds.
They almost always lost. There were almost always ten or twenty orcs hanging out at the fort. Sometimes a lot more.
Their Drinkee fests were freakin' great.
That's the kind of content you can't get from WoW. Or any other carebare MMO. You don't even get that kind of content with Eve (though you do get truly righteous massive space battles, which are kinda cool I guess). Heck, even a primarily PvP game like DAoC didn't get content like that.
What's missing? Here's the attributes UO had that garnered more of that kind of behavior than any other MMO to date:
1) Free-range PvP outside of towns
2) easy ability to tell if a PK was a PK on first sight
3) "stuff" was relatively easy and cheap to come by. Lost a set of armor? meh, you probably have another couple sets sitting in the bank that are just as good.
4) You didn't have to go out grinding a treadmill to get to a state where you could comfortable interact with the rest of the game. It took 3-4 days of heavy playing to get a solid character up and running.
5) there were craptons of "useless" items that actually showed up when you dropped 'em on the ground. Bones, rugs, mugs, clothes, everything. Heck, even "beef jerky" (too bad they had to take that out after they released in Germany)
6) It didn't force your playing into a paradigm. Instead of being an amusement park with clearly marked lines and rides, it was an adventure.
7) At the time, it was something that was brand spankin' new. Sure, Meridian 59 and other MUDs around had done similar stuff. But none of it had the mainstream appeal that UO had.
Of cou
Having actually been one of the early adopters of WoW, I wonder where you found that adventure and exploration and where do you think it disappeared. The same original zones are still there, the same quests are there, and people always just wanted a good game.
And most importantly, again, this is the same kind of people we had from day 1, and this is the kind of things they've asked for. I just need to remember the history of the plugins and sites, to realize that the average player always just wanted to be shown where to go to hand it in and collect his loot, and that's how they played the game.
Compared to other games, WoW offered the _least_ mystery and exploration, and people actually _liked_ it that way. E.g., it was very much appreciated that you actually saw a big yellow mark over the head of everyone who could give you a quest. As opposed to actually having to go talk to every single stupid NPC, only to see that 99% still have nothing for you, like in a couple of other online games.
But anyway, really, exactly which place you used to adventure and explore in, that no longer exists?
Methinks that the only thing that changed is you. You were seeing it back then through the eyes of someone who's all new to it, and for whom discovering a new town was an exciting new thing. You're now a jaded old veteran who not only knows exactly where that town is, but also where every single NPC is, and what quests they have, and what items they sell. That's really what killed any sense of adventure and exploration, not anything Blizzard did.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The original idea of UO was that players would govern themselves, and game mechanics should interfere as little as possible with the player's choice between good and evil. This would form communities, cause players to stick together and take sides. While the idea was great in theory, it didn't work out too well. UO was haunted by rampant player killing, griefing and cheating, causing many players to leave the game. After several other attempts, game designers decided to solve this problem by splitting the world into two facets (called Trammel and Felucca). In one facet, nonconsensual player killing was impossible. In the other facet, player killing was unrestricted.
The problems arising from this shaped Ultima Online until today. On the one hand, Felucca still allows unlimited mass-murdering and player griefing. On the other hand, Trammel is home to players who want to play a risk-free item-based game. The splitting of the world caused a lot of communities to break apart and fade. It opened Felucca as a niche for players who had fun with mass-murdering and who could afford the necessary equipment, and banned the rest of the players into a world without risk and challenge and without the necessity of player interaction. The original concept had been destroyed for good.
Today, most game designers know that the coexistence of good and evil in the same world is an essential feature of any MMORPG. It is what welds players together, forms communities, creates unlimited adventures. Implementing artificial PvP boundaries, like PvP switches or PvP zones, destroys all that and only proves that the game designer was not able to come up with realistic solutions.
Why did the original idea fail? It failed, cause it lacked the required tools to create a balance between good and evil. Players never really were able to govern themselves. "Good" players felt victimized and helpless against "evil" players.
The root of the problem was that the UO player is forced to make a choice. A choice between Felucca and Trammel. A choice between black and white. Those who preferred all the grays in between, left to play other MMORPGs. On this page, there's an interesting description of a system that would allow both good and evil in the same world, without the possibility of rampant griefing:
http://www.aschulze.net/ultima/blog/blog_20100217.htm#coexistence